Wargaming the peace?

Sort of. What it really seems to come down to is an attempt to wargame the kind of dynamics that clear thinkers can discern through a deep sense of history and culturally sensitive perception. In other words, an attempt to computerize the dynamics that General David Petraeus’ group understood in Iraq (author’s note: I might be biased, since Thomas Ricks’ The Gamble is on my nightstand).

As Wired’s recent piece on the financial crisis suggests, the success of models like these depends on the assumptions involved. Common sense, really. The more you assume away, the more modest the aspirations you need to have for your model. Yet I suspect there’s something inherent in models like these that tend to seduce people away from modest aspirations. Especially when they come loaded with datasets and cool visualizations.